The greatest pleasure of writing about pop music – even more than the free tickets and records, nice as they are – is seeing some tiny, as yet unnoticed act and being dazzled by them, then taking every chance you can to wang on about them until other people start to feel the same. Music writers tend not to have many opportunities to do something good – alas, Nick Kent did not expose the thalidomide scandal; it wasn’t Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs who got to the bottom of Watergate – but it’s truly gratifying when a band you have championed rises from the toilet circuit, even if they never make it to the stadiums.
I first saw Stornoway, a folk-pop group from Oxford, bottom of the bill in a pub basement in 2009. Gosh, they were terrific – songs that oozed melody, unusual and unselfconscious lyrics, and plenty of shy charm – and I thoroughly abused my position editing the Guardian’s Friday arts section to mention them in the paper as often as I could.
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